Quotes By Letter: S

“I used to think she was quite intelligent in my stupidity. The reason I did was because she knew quite a lot about the theatre and plays and literature and all that stuff. If somebody knows quite a lot about those things, it takes you quite a while to find out whether they're really stupid or not.”

-The Catcher In The Rye, J.D. Salinger

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“I'm sort of an atheist. I like Jesus and all, but I don't care too much for most of the other stuff in the Bible. Take the Disciples, for instance. They annoyed the hell out of me, if you want to know the truth. They were all right after Jesus was dead and all, but while He was alive, they were about as much use to Him as a hole in the head. All they did was keep letting Him down. I like almost anybody in the Bible better than the Disciples. If you want to know the truth, the guy I like best in the Bible, next to Jesus, was that lunatic and all, that lived in the tombs and kept cutting himself with stones. I like him ten times as much as the Disciples, that poor bastard.”

-The Catcher In The Rye, J.D. Salinger

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“It was that kind of a crazy afternoon, terrifically cold, and no sun out or anything, and you felt like you were disappearing every time you crossed a road.”

-The Catcher In The Rye, J.D. Salinger

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“Only, this time I thought I was dying. I really did. I thought I was drowning or something. The trouble was, I could hardly breathe.”

-The Catcher In The Rye, J.D. Salinger

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“When I leave a place I like to know I'm leaving it. If you don't, you feel even worse.”

-The Catcher In The Rye, J.D. Salinger

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“You take somebody that cries their goddam eyes out over phoney stuff in the movies, and nine times out of ten they're mean bastards at heart.”

-The Catcher In The Rye, J.D. Salinger

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“And the blood, it pours like rain
Dripping on everyone's lives so it won't be the same
Bruises on her arms and heartstrings are just too much to bear
And the cuts run deep that she doesn't choose to wear
Oh, the black eyed tears, the pour like rain
And it's just too much to try and cover up her pain

She quietly drinks her pain away a little differently
With pink lemonade, but so much like Davey
She cries herself to sleep at night
She hopes that just one thing will go right.”

-Briana, Ashley Salvador

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“Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.”

-Good Morning, America, Carl Sandburg

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“Depression must be avoided, no matter what the cost. Depression is lying on the Edwardian couch for six months, too tired to unlace your shoes. Depression is awakening each morning feeling as if someone near and dear and closely related died the night before. Bad news. Don't tempt depression.”

-Social Blunders, Tim Sandlin

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“Everybody's vaguely miserable sometimes...and most people are vaguely miserable most of the time. The trick is to scrap your way from the most-of-the-time to the some-of-the-time category.”

-Social Blunders, Tim Sandlin

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“Manic depressives have all the luck; they soar between crashes. The best us regular depressives can do is battle our way up to normal every now and then.”

-Social Blunders, Tim Sandlin

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“Life begins on the other side of despair.”

-Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, Jean-Paul Sartre

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“And I-soft, weak, obscene, digesting, juggling with dismal thoughts-I too was In the way. Fortunately, I didn't feel it, although I realized it, but I was uncomfortable because I was afraid of feeling it (even now I am afraid-afraid that it might catch me behind my head and lift me up like a wave). I dreamed vaguely of killing myself to wipe out at least one of these superfluous lives. But even my death would have been In the way. In the way, my corpse, my blood on these stones, between these plants, at the back of this smiling garden. And the decomposed flesh would have been In the way in the earth which would received my bones, at last, cleaned, stripped, peeled, proper and clean as teeth, it would have been In the way: I was In the way for eternity.”

-Nausea, Jean-Paul Sartre

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“Twenty-seven men with faces blackened and shiny - with hatchets in their belts, bombs in pockets, knobkerries - waiting in a dug-out in the reserve line. At 10.30 they trudge up to Battalion H.Q. splashing through the mire and water in a chalk trench, while the rain comes steadily down. Then up to the front-line. In a few minutes they have gone over and disappeared into the rain and darkness.

I am sitting on the parapet listening for something to happen - five, ten, nearly fifteen minutes - not a sound - nor a shot fired - and only the usual flare-lights. Then one of the men comes crawling back; I follow him to our trench and he tells me that they can't get through. They are all going to throw a bomb and retire.

A minute or two later a rifle-shot rings out and almost simultaneously several bombs are thrown by both sides; there are blinding flashes and explosions, rifle-shots, the scurry of feet, curses and groans, and stumbling figures loom up and scramble over the parapet - some wounded. When I've counted sixteen in, I go forward to see how things are going. Other wounded men crawl in; I find one hit in the leg; he says O'Brien is somewhere down the crater badly wounded. They are still throwing bombs and firing at us: the sinister sound of clicking bolts seem to be very near; perhaps they have crawled out of their trench and are firing from behind the advanced wire.

At last I find O'Brien down a deep (about twenty-five feet) and precipitous crater. He is moaning and his right arm is either broken or almost shot off: he is also hit in the right leg. Another man is with him; he is hit in the right arm. I leave them there and get back to the trench for help, shortly afterwards Lance-Corporal Stubbs is brought in (he has had his foot blown off). I get a rope and two more men and go back to O'Brien, who is unconscious now. With great difficulty we get him half-way up the face of the crater; it is now after one o'clock and the sky is beginning to get lighter. I make one more journey to our trench for another strong man and to see to a stretcher being ready. We get him in, and it is found that he has died, as I had feared.”

-describing in his diary details of a patrol into No Man's Land that took place on May 25, 1916, Siegfried Sasson

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“I knew a simple soldier boy
Who grinned at life in empty joy,
Slept soundly through the lonesome dark,
And whistled early with the lark.

In winter trenches, cowed and glum,
With crumps and lice and lack of rum,
He put a bullet through his brain.
No one spoke of him again.

You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye
Who cheer when soldier lads march by,
Sneak home and pray you'll never know
The hell where youth and laughter go.”

-Suicide In The Trenches, Siegfried Sasson

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“There's no joy without the pain
It's the pain that makes us strong.”

-Mistaken, Save Ferris

Recommended by Suzanne.

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“The worst sin -- perhaps the only sin -- passion can commit, is to be joyless.”

-Dorothy L. Sayers

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“Bees in the caramel and I'm not afraid
Surgeons make incisions
What a mess they've made
Tearing at my skin leaving knives in my brain
Stabbing at the voices making me insane
Girls vomit candy and lies that they're fed.
Boys whisper lullabies and wet their beds
Eat TV violence on the toast that they spread
Talking with their mouths full here is what they've said.”

-Band Aid Covers The Bullet Hole, Scarling

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“How much would you pay for a person?”

-Schindler's List [movie]

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“Power is when we have every justification to kill, and we don't.”

-Schindler's List [movie]

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“They tell us that suicide is the greatest piece of cowardice; that only a madman could be guilty of it, and other insipidities of the same kind; or else they make the nonsensical remark that suicide is wrong, when it is quite obvious that there is nothing in the world to which every man has a more unassailable title than to his own life and person.”

-On Suicide, Arthur Schopenhauer

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“I cannot tell if this is a breakthrough
or a breakdown.
I'm too close to tell.”

-I Don't Want To Be Crazy, Samantha Schutz

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“I crave broken men.”

-I Don't Want To Be Crazy, Samantha Schutz

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“To have one's individuality completely ignored is like being pushed quite out of life--like being blown out as one blows out a light.”

-Evelyn Scott

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“I just don't think I can continue to live in a place that embraces and nurtures apathy as if it was virtue.”

-Se7en [movie]

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